SOMETHING MISSING AT TREBLINKA

- Danny M. Cohen -

I'm standing close to where they burned the bodies. This is Treblinka. The bus will depart soon, but I'm not ready to leave.

In the simple museum between Treblinka I (the Nazi labor camp) and Treblinka II (the extermination camp), our group educator calls me over to look at a facsimile of a Nazi document – in both German and Polish – specific regional guidelines on the treatment of the Roma and Sinti, the so-called Zigeuner.

Gypsies are to be brought to the Jewish ghetto. Gypsies are obligated to wear white armbands with the letter Z. Those who try to help Gypsies will be shot.

I first heard the word Treblinka in primary school. I remember reading a poem about a packed train headed to the camp. "Treblinka, Treblinka." The name sounded frightening to me – a place of horror.

Treblinka II was one of the six Nazi camps designed for mass-murder. The site contains the grave of around 925,000 people of Jewish descent and approximately 2,000 people of Roma or Sinti descent, mostly murdered in gas chambers.

After a revolt in 1943 during which some 300 prisoners escaped the camp, the Nazi leadership ordered the complete destruction of the Treblinka complex and turned the site into farmland. The Nazis were the first Holocaust deniers.

In the museum, still examining the Nazi rules for Roma and Sinti, I realize I'm the only person left in the exhibition. I walk alone to the site of Treblinka II. My stomach hurts. I let out a heavy sigh and follow the signs.

The pathway is made up of rounded stones, which makes it difficult to keep the rhythm of a steady pace. The weather is cool, the trees green and full. I walk over the area that once held the camp’s gate. Blocks set into the ground like a ladder indicate rail tracks.

I face a sea of stones of different sizes and shapes, an abstract graveyard, each stone representing a place. Some stones have been engraved with specific names of Polish cities, towns, villages – Warszawa, Chmielnik. Some stones are draped with flags of Israel.

A massive stone monument in the center – standing on the site of one of Treblinka’s gas chambers – is adorned with a menorah, its central branch broken to indicate Jewish lives cut short.

I walk into the open field of wild grass and tall flowers. In the sunshine, flies buzz around me. I remove my jacket. It was here that their bodies were burned, their ashes compounded. My head spins with moments of my childhood mixed with the events of the last few days.

In Kraków, just days earlier, after a lecture on the history of Polish Jews, I asked the professor about the current relationship between the Jewish and Roma communities of Poland. "We cannot ignore the Roma victims," she told us, even though she hadn’t mentioned them until I had asked my question.

Standing here in Treblinka, another question comes to me and my eyes find our educator. I walk quickly to him, across the field. "Is there a monument here to the Roma and Sinti?" I ask. He shakes his head. There is not.

The bus is ready to depart Treblinka, to return us to the restored cityscape of Warsaw. But I don't want to leave the site. I want to stay. As if I owe it to myself. As if I owe it to the nameless.

My head fills with clichés and more questions and some answers. Is this a holy place? No, God does not exist. Do ghosts scream? Are the remains of the people within this soil calling to us to be remembered? Are theses ghosts soothed by the prayers and the monuments and the tears?

The Jewish souls call to us through the wild flowers above their single grave. Their cries are answered by the Jewish monuments in Treblinka. In Warsaw. In Berlin. In Jerusalem. In Skokie. In New York.

And I stand here, trying to listen to the cries of the Roma and Sinti whose ashes and bones mingle with those of the Jews. We are connected, yet these adults and children are still so often ignored. Forgotten. But I can hear them. And I will never leave.